tag:www.schneier.com,2015:/blog//2/tag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-2015-06-24T13:29:49ZComments for How the FISA Court Undermines TrustA blog covering security and security technology.Movable Typetag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-comment:1595517Comment from haha on 2013-07-30haha
Its also hilarious to contrast the supposedly inviolate rule that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" with the secret interpretations of the law by secret courts.

When there's no way to confirm what the government thinks the law means, and no way to challenge the constitutionality of the law (due to technicalities ensure that almost nobody has standing to challenge it even though almost everybody is affected by it)... then "rule of law" is obviously completely and totally dead. These ass-clowns have helped to hasten the demise of ordinary citizens' respect for the rule of law by effectively refusing to be bound by it themselves.

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2013-07-30T20:25:05Z2013-07-30T20:25:05Ztag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-comment:1587631Comment from chris on 2013-07-25chris
Reading this I can't help thinking of Kafka's "The Trial" where a man is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents from an unspecified agency for an unspecified crime. A prescient and relevant tale in respect to the ‘terrorism’ perpetrated by modern governmental bureaucracies against their citizens.]]>
2013-07-25T13:16:58Z2013-07-25T13:16:58Ztag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-comment:1586114Comment from jon on 2013-07-24jon
I think we can trust the FISA Court to sign off on anything.]]>
2013-07-24T16:49:24Z2013-07-24T16:49:24Ztag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-comment:1585818Comment from everyday.guy on 2013-07-24everyday.guy
The court system they created is a complete mockery of everything that is good in the US legal system.

There is no difference between this court system and the corrupt systems the old British government came up with, which the constitution was directed against.

There is no difference between this court system and what you see in countries that have no humans rights.

It is, in fact, the same thing.

Very devilish work.

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2013-07-24T12:25:15Z2013-07-24T12:25:15Ztag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-comment:1585727Comment from jfw on 2013-07-24jfwhttp://ball.askemos.org
I've been working for a while on an arguable tamper-proof system.
It's designed to following closely the ethical and judicial ideas which form the foundation of at least western democracies. (To be sure it's never becomes illegal here.) Program code is therein handled as if it was a contract. Facts in the sense of "seen and understood to be true by the legal system" are established by execution of the same program at various hosts. Those act akin to a witness. The common understanding available to most peers is taken then to be true. There is an obvious recursion: the code itself has to be established as a common known fact before it can be executed (to arrive by a common checksum over an transaction). This recursion terminates, once it finds the "first contract" - the technical equivalent of a constitution.

That's how it works. We can create secret realms at top as well as public registries (a.k.a version control systems with full audit trail down to the hashsum) easily.

For a while we tried: we had a config parameter, which would allow to execute secret or time-variant code. Forget it! Impossible to secure without an omni-privileged administration. And even then: even this power can not proof to itself that the system has not been tampered with. We removed the switch.

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2013-07-24T11:14:36Z2013-07-24T11:14:36Ztag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-comment:1585117Comment from TraitorPatriot on 2013-07-23TraitorPatriot
The FISA courts are a complete sham. These courts were designed from the very beginning as a court system that would let the government do whatever it wanted. It's a court system where the government almost always wins. ]]>
2013-07-24T02:44:29Z2013-07-24T02:44:29Ztag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-comment:1585093Comment from MissRonda on 2013-07-23MissRonda
A retired judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, James Robertson, argued for several changes including adding a privacy advocate to the court's closed hearings to allow an adversarial process.
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2013-07-24T02:16:46Z2013-07-24T02:16:46Ztag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-comment:1585080Comment from Nargunomics on 2013-07-23Nargunomics
So on one hand we have a Star Chamber passing down secret rulings that undermine the rule of law, on the other hand we have examples of ordinary courts showing signs of being cosy with large corporations.

The Administrations's undermining confidence in the independence of the law. That is, the law in the US now resembles that which brought Indonesia to the edge of violent collapse in the late 1990s.

The Chinese aren't dumb. How long will they continue to buy Federal bonds to prop up a failing regime?

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2013-07-24T02:07:12Z2013-07-24T02:07:12Ztag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-comment:1585065Comment from Rich on 2013-07-23Rich
Since it always hears one side on every case it should always be referred to as "the FISA hemi-court"]]>
2013-07-24T01:51:24Z2013-07-24T01:51:24Ztag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-comment:1585019Comment from Dirk Praet on 2013-07-23Dirk Praet
In essence, how can any sane person vest any trust in secret courts issuing secret orders under secret interpretations of the law, and whereby those affected by said orders can't even speak about them ?

Any which way you turn it, that's a complete travesty of justice and democracy, and a trademark of a police state. Full stop. It's the kind of stuff that should instill much more fear in people than that for the odd (and mostly incompetent) terrorist.

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2013-07-24T01:05:21Z2013-07-24T01:05:21Ztag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-comment:1585000Comment from wkwillis on 2013-07-23wkwillis
The US establishment hates Snowden and will never give up on putting him in jail. He embarrassed them in from of their voters by telling them from a position of authority/trust that the government really does have the ability to crack down on immigration, tax evasion, and voter fraud by traffic analysis of phone calls.
Slander, perjury on indictments, perjured testimony, selective enforcement of littering laws, whatever it takes to punish him.
The good news for Snowden is that the establishment is about to lose their control of the government due to running out of money.
I figure that Snowden's future includes a medal and a pension, probably a generals pension since that is established by act of Congress, not the usual procedure.]]>
2013-07-24T00:35:29Z2013-07-24T00:35:29Ztag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-comment:1584911Comment from Clive Robinson on 2013-07-23Clive Robinson
@ David Sucher,

What has Snowden done which has attracted more attention, vitriol, wild remarks from high-level politicians etc etc than have other whistleblowers such as Binney? At least so it appears.

It is doubtfull that Mr Snowden has done much in the way of actually committing a crime. However what he has done is in effect embarrass not just the administration but the Presedent as well, and has shown them to be both incompetent and impotent.

As far as I can tell nothing that Ed Snowden has so far released is not actually known, calculated or surmised from available evidence. The important thing is that it has turned what was a reasonable suspicion in a few peoples minds, into incriminating evidence in many if not most US (and WASP nation) citizens who have read the articles.

Barak Obama was revealed to be a control freak about his image at the begining of his first term with his requirments for potential candidates for administration positions.

I suspect that Obama is very concerned about how history will view his Presidency as "The First Black President", thus being revealed as incompetent, impotent and a hypocrit is not what he wants. Already many view Obama as worse than Nixon and as such these revelations are in effect making him look so bad that he will probably be remembered as "the president who turned the US into a Police State" thus eclipsing the actions of the preceading G.W.Bush administration.

Right now the longer Ed Snowden remains out of US hands the more incompetent and impotent the US President and his administration will apear to US citizens. But to the citizens of other countries Obama and his administration have been held up to be compleate hypocrits as well. Worse for Obama, he is known to have made comment on other national leaders as "light weights" and other derogatory terms, well he has been "hoist by his own petard" and he is now no doubt aware he is considered at best a lame duck on the world stage not just by other national leaders but by many of the citizens of those nations as well.

As Obama's Presidency draws to a close, will William Shakespears opening words for Mark Antony come to haunt him,

Friends Romans Countrymen, lend me your ears, I come to bury Ceaser not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interened with their bones, so let it be with Ceaser.

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2013-07-23T22:33:39Z2013-07-23T22:33:39Ztag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-comment:1584835Comment from David Sucher on 2013-07-23David Sucher
General question because I am not sure where to ask:

What has Snowden done which has attracted more attention, vitriol, wild remarks from high-level politicians etc etc than have other whistleblowers, such as Binney? At least so it appears.

Is there a different reaction? More attention to NSA, FISA, security/privavcy issues etc etc now than in past few years? Is it that Snowden has actually done anything? Or is just that the accumulated disclosure starts to tip public attention? And why? If it is true and not just my observation.

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2013-07-23T21:04:19Z2013-07-23T21:04:19Ztag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-comment:1584774Comment from Clive Robinson on 2013-07-23Clive Robinson
Hmm, this thread is very intertwined with the earlier thread about Marc Rotenburg going to SCOTUS and the second article of the back and forth comments in US Today.

In essence the current and previous administrations are singing from the same song sheet that "all's well in the garden, provided we don't bite the forbiden fruit" by questioning what is done "in our name"...

Why do I get a film clip spring to mind of a military court with a commander shouting at the prosecutor "You Can't handel the truth!" when seaking to cover up malfiesence...

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2013-07-23T19:33:45Z2013-07-23T19:33:45Ztag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-comment:1584767Comment from NobodySpecial on 2013-07-23NobodySpecial
But JFK was president in the cold war - he didn't have to deal with the very real threat of terrorist complaining about drinking water (http://www.tennessean.com/article/20130620/NEWS11/306200108?gcheck=1)
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2013-07-23T19:26:18Z2013-07-23T19:26:18Ztag:www.schneier.com,2013:/blog//2.4920-comment:1584723Comment from Peter Andersson on 2013-07-23Peter Andersson
Once upon a time there was a president in the US who said:

The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it...